Meet My Representative

I’m Anthony, a 27 year old sales trainer, author at artofconversations.com and guest blogger at Techhelper (thanks Nick). In my quest of ‘Mastering the Art of Conversation’ I spend a fair amount of my time using technology to communicate with my friends, family and business colleagues but as technology evolves I have noticed we have stopped using it as a tool and instead started to rely on it as our first point to conversation.

During my teenage years of school I moved institutes three times in six years (I moved because my parents environment changed rather than being kicked out). Anyone who has moved schools and had to make a new circle of core friends knows the difficulty of being the new kid.

Will people like me? What are their social norms? How long will I be eating lunch alone for? Despite the challenges of moving schools there was always one immediate win. I could portray who I wanted to be, I was a gate keeper to my history and anything about me would need to come from me, all my past mistakes could be replayed with new knowledge and as long as I had a good lie (and stuck to it) I could potentially get away with anything. It was awesome!

When I was introduced to the world of social media all those years ago I noticed the same patterns.

Take a moment to open up your Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Tumblr, Yammer or any other way you social network with a profile. Look at your profile and be honest, is that really you?

Are those television shows/movies/music artists really your favourite?

Is your display picture a current and natural looking picture or are you duck facing to perk your cheeks or taking a photo from a higher angle to hide your double chin?

Do you untag yourself from bad photos or do you keep them up?

Do you add attractive girls or celebrities that you don’t personally know?

Do you delete comments because they don’t meet your view of the world?

If you have been honest, you will have admitted to doing one of the previously mentioned actions. There isn’t anything wrong with it. It was only this weekend that I quickly rushed to put a singlet on to scale a fish while my friend filmed the event for his travel blog. The video was going on to YouTube and regardless of if it was going to have 1 hit or 1,000,000 hits, I didn’t want to be represented online in a way that I didn’t think represented me.

We all act in a way that compliments who we want to be. Women wear heels because they want to be taller, guys grow facial hair to be cooler and both sexes get tattoos to represent something in their life. While it is ok for us to portray in an image that isn’t necessarily us we still need to remember who we really are and that we are perfect the way we are.

The great thing about social media is that we are able to think about what we are going to say (if you maxamise this or not is another thing). Instead of blurting something and possibly looking silly, I’m able to think about my response and even research online. How often do you think about what you are saying in real life or do you have a direct connection between your brain and your mouth?

My last guest post mentioned that we are communicating face to face less and we are beginning to rely on technology more. It is important that our real life and virtual ‘profiles’ start to align so we don’t disappoint others or ourselves. There is nothing worse then meeting someone who don’t meet your expectation…

Anthony Magro

Anthony Magro is a highly qualified and experienced corporate training and sales professional.Though dedication, enthusiasm, creativity, charisma, innovation and influence he is rapidly rising in his career with an industry leader at Salmat.
Anthony also authors his own blog. Click the link below to visit his website for more.